The Sleep of Reason
1797-1799
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1797 Death of Frederick-William II
of Prussia. Madame de Stael gathers Napoleon's opponents at her
Paris salon.
1797 Goya puts together albums of studies and caricatures that form
the basis for the Caprichos. Plans to publish a series of etchings
under the title of Suenos (Dreams).
1798 Work on the Caprichos. Portraits of intellectuals of his day;
series of witch paintings for the Duchess of Osuna; drawings for the
dictionary of Spanish artists by Bermudez.
1798 Napoleon's Egypt Campaign. Birth of the French painter Eugene
Delacroix.
1799 The German explorer Alexander von Humboldt begins his travels through Central and South America.
1799 In January a newspaper advertisement publicizes the appearance of
the Caprichos; after a short time, sales are discontinued.
1803 Goya presents the Caprichos to the Royal Institute of
Printing, to protect them from the Inquisition.
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Francisco de Goya
Self-Portrait
Capricho N. 1
1797-1798
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During the final years of the century, Goya created one of his
most important works: the Caprichos, a series of grotesque,
satirical, enigmatic prints. The self-portrait on the title page
shows him coolly distant, disillusioned, and a little morose
(opposite). The Caprichos, a savage critique of social evils and
human weakness, are a channel for Goya's personal experience and
fantasies. They are also, above all, a reflection of the philosophy
of the Enlightenment. Goya was well acquainted with the leading
proponents of the new ideas. Although the meaning of individual
pages in the Caprichos is often unclear, they still address the
observer directly, even today, and have lost nothing of their
expressive power. Only a few copies were circulated publicly in
Goya's lifetime. It was not until after his death that they became
known abroad, and were to exercise a strong influence on the art of
the 19th and 20th centuries.
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Goya and the Enlightenment
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Francisco de Goya
Self-Portrait with Eyeglasses
1797-1800
Oil on canvas 63x49 cm
Saragossa, Museo Camon Aznar
Goya painted more self-portraits than any other Spanish artist of
his time, constantly recording his own image at every stage of his
long and varied career. This so-called "intellectual" portrait
is the only one in which he depicts himself with his glasses. An
admission of this type of physical imperfection was
unusual for the time.
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Goya came into contact with the ideas of the Enlightenment through
his friendships with liberal intellectuals. In the period after his
illness, the ilustrados (the "enlightened") introduced him to a new,
critical view of the world. Men like Jovellanos, Bermudez, and
Moratin, who were among the leaders of society in Spain, brought him
inspiration for his Caprichos, a work rich in references, some of
them highly ambiguous.
The aim of the Enlightenment, which spread throughout Europe towards
the end of the i 8th century, was to establish reason as the sole
guide to thought and action. Freedom of the press and impartial
justice were demanded, and the latest discoveries in science and
technology were discussed, as were the current works of literature.
In Spain the Church, supported by the Inquisition, strenuously
resisted the spread of Enlightenment ideas and so liberalization
took longer there than in other countries. Conditions became more
critical after the French Revolution. Studying abroad was forbidden,
and Enlightenment publications, including works by Voltaire,
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Denis Diderot, were placed on the Index,
the Church's list of banned books. During a temporary period of
greater freedom, Goya was able to think about publishing the
Caprichos. But the intrigues of the court were unpredictable. Barely
had reformist politicians taken up influential posts when they were
threatened with dismissal, imprisonment, or banishment. Goya's
friend Jovellanos, a brilliant legal mind, was banished. In a series
of impressive portraits of friends, Goya now portrays the
representatives of the Spanish Enlightenment. These, unlike his
earlier formal portraits, seek to grasp the individual personality
beneath the sitter's rank.
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Francisco de Goya
Portrait of Gaspar
Melchiorde
Jovellanos
1798
Oil on canvas
205x133 cm
Madrid, Vizcondesa
de lrueste
The lawyer and man of letters Gaspar Melchior de Jovellanos, Goya's
friend, was one of the most important thinkers of the Spanish
Enlightenment. He greatly appreciated Goya's art and gave him several
important commissions. In 1788 Jovellanos, a liberal, was relieved of
his position at the royal court; ten years later, however, he was
re-called by Charles IV to be Minister of Justice.
Goya's portrait shows him in 1798, when he was at the height of his
power, not as a vigorous politician but as a thoughtful intellectual
in a pose traditionally associated with melancholy.
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Francisco de Goya
The Duchess of Alba Arranging Her Hair
1796-97
Indian ink wash, 171 x 101 mm
Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid
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Francisco de Goya
Girl Listening to a Guitar
1796-97
Indian ink wash, 170 x 99 mm
Museo del Prado, Madrid
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Francisco de Goya
Nude Woman Holding a Mirror
1796-97
Indian ink wash, 234 x 145 mm
Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid
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Francisco de Goya
Couple with Parasol on the Paseo
1796-97
Indian ink wash, 220 x 134 mm
Kunsthalle, Hamburg
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The Caprichos
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Francisco de Goya
Back to his ancestors
Capricho No. 39
1797-1798
Etching and aquatint 21.5x15 cm
The meaning of this print is that anyone who uses their family tree
and coat of arms to prove their fine ancestry is an ass - like Queen
Maria Luisa, who created genealogical testimonials for her favorite,
Godoy. Goya caricatured the behavior of the aristocracy more than
once. In doing so, he was continuing an old tradition of satire.
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In the perfume and liquor stores in the Calle del Desengano, very
close to Goya's home, you could buy the Caprichos for 320 reales in
February 1799. An edition contained 80 large-format prints, numbered
and with captions. The title Caprichos means whims — astonishing,
fantastical ideas. Tiepolo and Giovanni Battista Piranesi had
already created a series of such capricci. Under this title artists
could permit themselves creative freedom, escaping the conventional
themes and rules of art. Sense and nonsense, gravity and satire were
all possible. Goya took out an advertisement in a Madrid newspaper
and announced that in the Caprichos he was depicting human folly,
prejudice, and deception. Obviously, he added, any similarity with
living people was purely coincidental. Nevertheless, his
contemporaries immediately recognized specific references in many
prints. Biting social satire and demonic fantasy combine in the
Caprichos to create a nightmare from which there is no escape. Goya
had envisaged good sales and had printed 300 copies. However, he was
very quickly forced to stop sales; a few years later, to protect his
work from the Inquisition, he gave the rest of the edition, together
with the plates, to the Royal Institute of Printing and in return
requested a bursary for his son Javier.
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Francisco de Goya
They carried her away!
Capricho No. 8
1797-1798
Etching and aquatint
21.7x15cm
Two faceless men are assaulting a woman who is screaming in
despair; the huddled figures give the impression more of a rape than
a kidnapping. Set against a completely dark background, the scene
suggests nameless horrors being carried out under the cloak of
darkness.
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Francisco de Goya
What a golden beak!
Capricho No.53
1797-1798
Etching and aquatint 21.7x15.1 cm
With open mouths and closed eyes, the gathering of learned men
listens attentively to a lecture from a parrot, which is
gesticulating with its claw as if in learned disputation. Their
spiritual inertia and their passive submission to authority prevent
those listening from appreciating how ridiculous the speaker and his
words are. A contemporary commentator was just as critical as Goya;
writing of doctors he observed: "They can
recite a complete list of diseases, but cannot heal them. They
deceive the patients and stuff the cemeteries with skulls."
For Goya it was clear that Church and Inquisition were inhibiting
progress in Spain. From their robes the figures in the foreground
are clearly identifiable as monks. Goya often criticized the Church
in his Caprrichos, and generally attacked the mendacious
double-dealing of monks and clerics.
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Francisco de Goya
Till death
Capricho No. 55
1797-1798
Etching and aquatint 21.8 x 16.2 cm
The Caprichos give a pitiless image of social and moral standards.
No matter who they are, no one escapes criticism -dignitaries, doctors,
lawyers, women, old people. Here a little
old lady preens herself vainly in front of the mirror and does not
notice how ugly she is, nor the laughter of those present. This could
be regarded as a swipe at the queen, Maria Luisa, and her affairs with
young men. But Goya was aiming higher than this. One of the basic themes
of his Caprichos is the
inability of people to see beyond self-delusion and deceit. The
glance into the mirror in this Capricho is clearly not a moment of
self-awareness, but the continuation of an illusion.
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The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters
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The ugly, ambiguous winged beast
The vexatious companion of the
night
Is swarming out and fluttering
About my head.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Tasso, 1790
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Reason and nightmare
The most famous print of the Caprichos series is No. 43.
While working, the artist has fallen asleep. Charcoal drawing sticks
and unfinished drawings are lying on the table and he has buried his
head in his arms. Fluttering towards him from the dark background
the flying creatures of the night are harrying him, their staring
eyes wide open. An owl has already taken hold of his drawing
materials. A nightmare, realistic and yet unreal. We see both the
sleeping form and what he is dreaming. The title is written in pale
letters on the table, El sueno de la razon produce monstruos: "the
sleep of reason produces monsters." As soon as the artist sleeps,
and his fantasy is no longer controlled by reason, he finds that he
is exposed to horrifying beings that threaten to overcome him. In
the Caprichos, both forces are at work: clear reason and a dark,
uncontrolled fantasy. Goya found the inspiration for this motif in
an exchange with friends, who were closely involved with the ideas
of the Enlightenment. For them, reason was the central concept: the
power of reason would reveal social injustice, banish
superstition, and subdue destructive passions.
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Francisco de Goya
The sleep of reason produces monsters
Capricho N. 43
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Francisco de Goya
The sleep of reason produces monsters
1797
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The emergence of the theme
Originally, Goya had planned a series entitled Suenos (dreams). A
sheet showing a dreaming author was intended as the title page. He
conceived these prints as a series of satirical images inspired by
Suehos, short prose pieces by the Spanish poet Francisco Gomez de
Quevedo (1580-1645). However, Goya then decided to place the page
with the dreaming artist among the other prints in the cycle, as
print No.43, where it forms the basis of a series of images
of demons and witches. A study shows how Goya developed the
dream apparitions from a jumble of sketches. There in the upper half
of the drawing appears his self-portrait wreathed in beams of light,
but surrounded by shadowy masks. Violent, dark hatching marks the
region of night's winged shadows. In a second study, he added to the
table an inscription clearly describing his intentions. It reads: "Ydioma
universal" meaning a generally understood universal language. Beneath
this is added: "The dreaming author. His sole intention is to banish
destructive banalities and, through this work of fantasy [caprichos],
to lend permanence to the reliable testament of truth." Instead of
this, the final version shows only the evocative final title of the
print, Goya's most widely quoted words.
Goya's technique
Goya was one of the first artists in Spain to use a new technique
from France, the so-called aquatint process, for the Caprichos
series. This made it possible to print not just lines, as with the
conventional form of etching, but also areas in finely granulated
tone. It was only with this process that the impenetrable gray of
the backgrounds and areas of shade were achieved which lend the
Caprichos their strange effect.
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Goya's Demons
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Goya's great contribution lies in the fact that he makes the
monstrous believable. His monsters are credible, well-balanced
creatures... All these contortions, these animal distortions and
devilish grimaces are thoroughly human. One cannot reject them, even
from the viewpoint of natural history... In a word, the line of
suture, the boundary between the real and the fantastic is
impossible to grasp ...
Charles Baudelaire
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Francisco de Goya
They're preening themselves again
Capricho No. 51
1797-1798
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Hieronymus Bosch
The Garden of Earthly Delights
Hell
1503 |
In the first part of the Caprichos, Goya uses the art of the
caricature to criticize specific social evils, such as
prostitution, the deceptions of love, and the corruption of monks and
of the aristocracy. In the next part, however, the figures in the
Caprichos assume positively demonic features, and the transition
between man and monster becomes uncertain. The denizens of the night
had occupied Goya's fantasy long before he gave them shape in the
Caprichos. He first painted devilish grimaces in 1783, in the dark
background to an altar painting for the Dukes of Osuna. There, they
embodied the power of death and the Devil, and a saint drives them
away with the help of God. Goya's idea for this motif was thus as an
element of traditional religious imagery. The threateningly
monstrous,
which has occupied the minds of men since time immemorial, had its
place in the world of Christian imagery as a representation of
Hell. The most famous examples of this can be found in the paintings
of the Netherlandish painter
Bosch
Hieronymus (1450-1516).His
pictures, overflowing with demonic grotesques, found early
appreciation in Spain.
In Goya's day, over 30 paintings by "EI Bosco," as the Spanish called
Bosch, were to be found in the Spanish royal collections, among them
the famous Garden of Earthly Delights. The
obscure symbolism of Bosch's vision of Hell, however, is still based
on a Christian view of the world, where good and evil have their
allotted place. In Goya's Caprichos, by contrast, there is no
longer any positive force to counter the dark and the monstrous. In
print after print we have new horrors bearing down on us, gathering
for inexplicable rituals, rising into the air in combat, or simply
cutting their huge claws. Goya's imagery
resists any unambiguous interpretation, though it is clear that
anticlerical and sexual references are hidden in many of the prints.
Goya's Enlightenment contemporaries shared his morbid fascination
for the demonic world. His close friend, the author Leandro
Fernandez Moratin, took an interest in the subject and gave Goya a
great deal of inspiration. Evenin the circles of the cultured
aristocracy, who, unlike the uneducated populace, no longer believed
in witches, the thrill of ghost stories remained as keen as ever.
Goya painted a series of witch pictures for the Duchess of Osuna's
Alameda country seat, which was itself called "El Capricho." The
painting entitled The Devil's Lamp refers directly to a
satirical play. The scene takes on a comic tone when it is realized
that the principal character is not really bewitched, merely
persuaded that he is by others.
In the Caprichos and in the late "Black Paintings," on the other
hand, a nightmare reality is created from the macabre humor. In
these pictures, Goya shows that the irrational. the demonic, and the
monstrous reside in humanity itself.
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Francisco de Goya
The Devil's Lamp
1797-1798
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